2013-03-30 james@burleyarch.com

Zero is an experiment trying out a simple approach to implementing
McCarthy's original Lisp. I had been curious about how that might have
been done.

In particular, I've been wondering how simple a "core" Lisp system can
be, while providing the building blocks necessary for the full power
and expressiveness one expects from Common Lisp.

Beyond Common Lisp, I hope to experiment with ways to provide more
control over the environment, including macros (from lexing through
parsing) and execution (more/full control over heap allocation,
perhaps avoiding the requirement that garbage collection be available;
more/full control over stack usage; and more/full control over
processor usage).

A key theme in this work is to invert the usual approach, that of
assuming the existence of, and necessarily building, monolithic code
analyzers (compilers and linkers, mainly) that figure out what needs
to be done, and instead design a language that works "from the inside
out" -- providing ways for the code itself to express what it needs,
when it needs it -- such that a "narrow" reading of a macro or
function answers many, if not all, of the necessary questions
regarding its build-time and run-time needs.